May 10, 2010

So, you’ve probably heard it all before:

The key to not losing weight is to ‘burn more calories than you consume.’

You accomplish this mean feat by counting how many calories you consume (to varying degrees of precision) and engaging in ‘cardio’ activity several times a week (3-5, depending on the purveyor of this advice) for at least 30 minutes a pop.

Doing so ensures you stay in a state of ‘caloric deficit’ which results in weight loss (or at least the absence of weight gain).

The crux of this post is intended to turn that thinking upside down. Regular visitors to this blog have seen me rail against the ‘calorie is a calorie’ idea, expressing strongly that the nature of the calories you consume plays a significant role in the extent to which you make fat for storage.

Now that I’ve taken on that commonly-held notion, it’s now time to focus on the other side of the coin: exercise. Here are a few alternate bullet points for you to consider:

Cardio exercise is bad for you (that’s right, I said bad for you)

The best type of exercise for ensuring weight control (and a vast array of other benefits) is strength training – many people call it weightlifting

The most effective way to perform strength training should take you no more than about an hour a week, and there’s a good chance you won’t even break a sweat doing it.

Well, I hope that has at least piqued your interest.

I’ve been admonished to keep my blog posts shorter, so I’ll try to go into the ‘why this works’ in brief and leave to you to follow up with the recommended readings. So, how does this approach work?

The single most beneficial thing you can do in the realm of exercise to control weight (read: lose fat) is to build muscle

The most effective, least time-consumptive and safest way to do build muscle is to engage in high-weight, slow-speed motion that ‘exhausts’ your muscle groups. This can be done for all the major muscle groups in the body in about a half an hour.

In order to get the maximum benefit from this ‘exhaustion’ is to give your muscles about a week to recover as it takes that long for your largest muscle fibers to re-build.

Lather, rinse, repeat

So that’s the summary. I can tell you I’ve been working out in this way for the last couple of months and it is hard to believe the time vs. benefit ratio.

This one is very light and breezy while still getting all the big ideas across. Heavy on the testimonials. There are times when it comes across mostly as an avertorial for the authors gym in Manhattan, but take it for what it’s worth.